


Four Months

by Jenwryn



Category: Death Note
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-29
Updated: 2008-11-29
Packaged: 2017-10-02 07:43:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mello has left the orphanage and, for the first time in his life, Matt has goals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Months

**Author's Note:**

> I have this theory that Roger wouldn't have let Matt leave the orphanage as easily as he allowed Mello to go. Let's face it, Mello would do whatever he damn well wanted, but Matt, Matt would be a different kettle of fish so far as Roger was concerned. Well, that's my own thoughts on the matter, anyway.

_A little before you made a leap into the dark."_

~ Thomas Brown, _Letters From The Dead To The Living, _1702.

*

The desk lamp pools light across the library table, lemony against the spread of papers and the dull grain of the hardwood. It's almost midnight, but the older students are permitted later hours and, besides, who's going to come and tell him to stop studying? He's isolated now, left in peace to do as he will, ever since they realised that it was better that way, and that leaving him alone was the simplest method to ensure his good behaviour. Besides, Wammy's House is a school, after all, even more than it is an orphanage and-

You know, it's a bizarre thing. Matt had never cared all that much about his grades in the past. Oh, of course he'd been aware of them (how could he not be?) but he'd always just done... whatever, and that had been sufficient. He'd never had the least desire to try and surpass Mello, let alone Near, but now...

But now Mello is gone, and Matt has a responsibility to make sure that he stays third or, second, technically (though he refuses to think of it like that). The redhead clings with a (grimly disbelieving) tenacity to the thought that his best friend might come back any day now and, either way, he just can't bear the idea of someone else in Mello's place. So, for now, just for now, he's traded in the games (mostly) for the musky-scent of books, and the tap-tap-tap of words on keyboards, and long, spidery calculations scrawled out across sheaves of graph paper. Because, regardless of which way you squint at it, Matt has to learn, and learn hard: for the first time in his life, Mail Jeevas has goals. Spiteful, little, dark-coloured goals, like protecting Mello's position even though he's _never coming back to claim it_, but also bigger, meaner goals - because soon, soon, soon he'll be sixteen and then he'll be leaving.

The dim glow hovers around him, swirling slowly in a room constructed of shadows and not-quite-straight bookshelves, moonlight curving in at the window panes where the silver light comes slipping over the high brick wall. Matt'd climbed that wall, five times and a half, after Mello had walked out the front gate. But they'd always brought him back, caught him up, consigned him to childhood while Mello, oh God _Mello with the fierce expressions and the soft, soft eyes_, Mello walks the world as a man in a slender body and Matt, Matt who'd been on the streets before he'd come here, Matt knows things he figures Mello doesn't, and all he wants is these two hands of his, these hands and a gun like the gun his father had owned, swift and stark, these hands and a gun to be there at Mello's side. Mello knows his own self, and that is what makes him such a force to be reckoned with, but Matt knows the _world_. And so he works and works, goggles slung low around his neck, ignored and forgotten; bends his head and reads of calculus and Cicero and corruption and C4.

Four more months, four more months.

And he'll be so useful that Mello won't be able to leave him ever again.


End file.
